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Keeping it reel

I understand the temptation to jump on the bandwagon and onto the latest technology.

In many, if not all, cases, the new thing is indeed better than the previous thing. Part of it too of course is the tendency to want to be part of the crowd flocking to the new. And when that happens, like everyone onboard an ocean liner moving to the same side, a lot can go down.

I often wonder in the transition to all things digital whether, if a hard copy is not maintained in traditional media, the next technology will be render the previous document unable to be deciphered. Not to mention whether some bad actor somewhere could erase, say, a studio’s digital holdings.

That’s one reason I’m happy to see that Eastman Kodak Co. has reached an agreement with six major studios to continue supplying them with film stock.

Several eminent filmmakers have been quite vocal about continuing to shoot with film rather than digitally, and largely as a result of their collective sway, the studios — Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. — agreed to make purchases of film over the next several years, guaranteeing sufficient orders to keep Kodak’s film plant in business.

The other reason is, of course, the beauty of the film medium. Digital has a lot to recommend: the ability to shoot in virtually any light; the steadiness of the projected image; the lack of wear on a digital image, which can be projected an apparently infinite amount of times with no degradation; the compactness of the equipment and its lower cost, making it possible to shoot a film very inexpensively.

But to anyone who’s seen a film-film pristinely projected, there’s just an allure, a magic to it; a romance; a depth to the images and the light that digital cannot duplicate.

Of course, reel-film projection is pretty much over. There are a handful of theaters across the U.S. that still project real film — and a report Friday noted that 90 percent of the world’s screens now are digital — but even if a movie, for example Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” is shot on film, what you see in a theater most likely has been converted to 1’s and 0’s.

Yet “Interstellar” and other such real-film films even when converted to digital maintain the look of the medium they were shot in. The medium continues to inspire creative filmmakers, visionaries, dreamers. So thanks to all involved for keeping it going.